


Confidential

by SegaBarrett



Category: Gotham (TV)
Genre: Frenemies with Benefits, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-21
Updated: 2020-12-21
Packaged: 2021-03-11 02:21:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,628
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28207482
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SegaBarrett/pseuds/SegaBarrett
Summary: Jim gets a tip.
Relationships: Oswald Cobblepot/Jim Gordon/Edward Nygma
Comments: 4
Kudos: 10
Collections: Gotham-X-Change-2020





	Confidential

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Inkfowl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Inkfowl/gifts).



> Disclaimer: I don't own Gotham, and I make no money from this.

Jim Gordon sat at the bar, drinking a glass of bourbon and wondering where his life had taken such a turn.

There had been a time in which he had been sure that the answer to his life was just around the corner – that he could find it by fixing the Gotham police department or defeating one of the many madmen who were constantly taking over the city.

But the answers wouldn’t come – unless he was looking for them at the bottom of the class at least. 

And that was what he was mulling over when he felt someone tap him on the shoulder. 

He sighed as he saw that it was none other than Oswald Copplepot, better known as “the Penguin”, and that he was looking at him with a huge, Cheshire-cat kind of grin. Or maybe, Jim thought to himself, a Cheshire penguin grin. 

“What do you want?” Jim snapped, “I don’t have anything to say to you.”

“You don’t have to say anything, old pal,” Oswald retorted. “You just need to listen. I’ve got information and I’ve got a plan, too, and I wanted you to be the very first to know all about it.” He rocked a little on his hip and tilted awkwardly to the side.

“Listen, Penguin, I’ve had about as much of your information as I can stand.” Jim spun around on the stool so he could look Oswald in the eye. “Your ‘help’ tends to be about as useful as swimming in a sea full of sharks.”

“It's funny you should mention sharks. Actually, funny story, humans are a lot more dangerous to sharks than the other way around,” Oswald said. “But... I thought you might like to know about a new plot involving the Falcone family. If you’d rather not, I could shop my information elsewhere. I’d hate to be a bother.”

“Come on, Penguin. What is it? Falcone was retired, last I heard, so why is he involved in a plot?”

“I didn’t say it was Falcone, himself,” Oswald replied, miming as if he was dangling the information in front of Jim’s eyes.

“Sofia, then?” Jim asked. “Or are there more Falcones out there, hidden away just to come back and annoy me when I’m trying to have a drink in peace?”

“Sofia, yes, but the tricky thing is that she’s not quite Sofia anymore. She’s become…”

“Oh, for the love of God, Penguin. Don’t tell me she has weird powers now, too.”

Penguin looked offended.

“Well, okay, if you’re going to go ahead and beat me to it.”  
Jim dragged a hand over his face.

“What the hell happened to her?” he said and then sighed. “Why should I even ask? What the hell happens to anyone in this town?”

“She was half-eaten by a shark, and then she formed as one with the shark.”

“That was rhetorical,” Jim said, and then boggled at him. “Please tell me that that isn’t serious?”

“But yet, he is,” said a voice, as another shadow stepped into the bar. Jim began to wonder if they should just start swinging doors and playing single guitar music already.

He craned his head and saw, now standing right behind Penguin, Edward Nygma. Of course it was – where one of them was, it seemed as if the other wasn’t far behind these days. 

“What do you want? Can’t I just drink in peace?” Jim asked. He was getting fed up with the entire life of a Gotham police officer – it was a thankless job and on more days than not, it wasn’t even someone trying to kill you but something, and the pension was a joke. 

“No,” Ed replied quickly, “Because we need to defeat this shark. She’s ruining my future plans and she ate my girlfriend.”

The look that Oswald gave to Jim seemed to indicate that Shark-Sofia may not have been the primary culprit in that situation, but Jim opted not to say anything. Instead, he tipped back the last of his drink, put a twenty on the bar, and got up.

“All right. I’ll look into it,” he said with an exasperated sigh. “But I have a feeling you’re not exactly telling me everything, now are you? Let’s have the other shoe drop now.”

“We made a deal with her,” Oswald said, and Ed gave him a look that seemed to indicate that this was news to him. “But she double-crossed us.”

Jim had the feeling that there was a lot of that going around.

“All right,” he finally said with a sigh, “Let’s go.”

***

Jim listened to the rattling of the elevated train and the tapping of rain against the shop windows. He was out here in the murky cold with Penguin and Riddler, because this was always the kind of place that Jim seemed to end up.

“Is she coming?” Jim asked, not entirely because he wanted to see what a cross between Sofia and a shark was (in some morbid center in his brain) but because there had to be something he could say in order to break the tension. Oswald and Ed seemed to keep looking at each other with this gaze that was making Jim heavily uncomfortable, especially when they both seemed to turn their gazes in his direction, too.

Especially since he had to shift the way he was standing every single time that they did it.

“She’ll be here,” Ed promised. 

However, as the night slowly turned to morning and Jim Gordon watched the sun rise, Sofia had not arrived, fins or not, and he rubbed a hand over his sleep-deprived eyes and glared at the pair.

“You plan on telling me exactly why you led me on a wild goose chase?” he inquired.

“Well,” Oswald declared, clapping his hands together, “You win some, you lose some. Perhaps she’s off in the pacific right about now, helping herself to some hapless surfer.”

Ed turned his head to look at Oswald and seemed to have something to say in response, but Jim didn’t want to hear it.

“Perhaps we could wait in the hotel,” Oswald said suddenly, “Isn’t it cold out here? We would have a much better, um, vantage point as well. Perhaps she’s on to us. After all, she does seem to have people everywhere – she’s a Falcone, after all.”

“Is she?” Jim asked dryly. “From what you told me, she’s a fish.”

“I’m sure the Falcone family is rather open-minded on the matter,” Oswald replied, “After all, last I checked, there aren’t all that many of them left.”

Jim dragged a hand over his face.

“I have to say I agree, Oswald,” Ed chimed in, “Let’s look down upon the matter.”

Jim gave them both a look that let on that he was more than a little suspicious, but he walked towards the run-down hotel with them both. He wondered, not for the first time, exactly what kind of business a hotel in the middle of Gotham even managed to get – did anyone actually come from out of town to stay in this bloodbath, or was it all simply made up of people who lived nearby and didn’t feel like taking the train home after they got up to their criminal, or otherwise socially inappropriate exploits?

Then again, Jim wasn’t even sure what was considered socially inappropriate to do in Gotham anymore, considering someone was always trying to take it over in one way or another.

“You’re lagging,” Ed complained, “I have no time for a slowpoke.”

They checked in, and Jim tried to ignore the fact that the front desk clerk was looking at him as if he were a cat that had just eaten a canary, but it had started to make him very uneasy. What kind of a trap was he walking into?

Maybe, Jim considered for the first time, he should have called Harvey in on all this – he would know what to do, after all (or, no, maybe he wouldn’t if Jim didn’t).

As Jim began to follow the two of them up the winding staircase, he had the first inkling that perhaps this wasn’t about wheeling and dealing or even an attempt to kill or kidnap Jim or any of the usual things that Penguin and Riddler would be up to on any kind of given day.

When the door to the hotel room shut and Oswald Copplepot pressed his lips against Jim’s, he decided that he definitely should have called Harvey. 

***

Jim was of the sudden opinion that there were far too many hands in places that he normally didn’t have hands. He wasn’t a babe in the woods by any means, but the fact that Oswald had crammed himself up against his shoulder and was nipping down his neck while Ed Nygma, who he hadn’t decided wasn’t surely about to kill him when this was all over, or maybe during, was squeezing Jim’s ass with a kind of frenzied passion that made Jim feel uneasy and excited at the same time.

He wouldn’t call them allies. They weren’t working together on a case, and he was damn sure that he wasn’t able to trust them; he wasn’t even sure if they could trust each other or if they were just using him to try and make each other jealous.

As Jim leant back a few moments later, completely spent and grapping for the wine in the minibar, tracing his lips with his tongue and looking at Ed and Oswald collapsed in a kind of dogpile beside him, he found that none of that really mattered.

Any information he got from them would be questionable at best.

But it had been one hell of a night.

Jim raised a toast to himself… and to Gotham.


End file.
